They also served: At Veterans Day, women remember their roles in defending the nation

America has always sent its finest men to fight its wars,
saluting them with well-deserved parades and accolades once a year
on Veterans Day. But, to coin a cliche, behind all the good
military men, there were good women being all their country allowed
them to be.

Veterans Day belongs to them too.

From the Revolutionary War to the current war in Iraq, women
have served in many capacities, mostly outside of combat, some
acknowledged, some not.

Some were the equivalent of clerks, but many served as nurses,
working to save the lives of the men injured in combat. Several
members of local social organizations that include female service
veterans recently shared stories about their military experiences
in times when a woman's place was generally considered to be in the
home.

Dorothy Sartori, 80, of Vista was a bookkeeper in her hometown
of Greenwich, Conn. She decided to enlist in the Navy during World
War II after seeing a recruitment poster that said "Uncle Sam wants
you, too." Her brother was already in the Navy, and an uncle who
served in the Coast Guard had died in 1942 when his cutter, the
Alexander Hamilton, was torpedoed on convoy duty in the North
Atlantic.

Her job included mundane but important tasks like saving tin
foil for the war effort and signing in new arrivals, a task that
had an unanticipated benefit -- she met her husband, Petty Officer
2nd Class Valentino Sartori, during her tour. He was a torpedoman,
a California native who had served more than two years in the
Pacific theater before being shipped to New London. Once they met,
"he kept finding all kinds of excuses why he had to come back to
ask some kind of question about something, and it wasn't long
before we were married," she said. They were both 19. The union
lasted 47 years. Sartori left the service with the rank of
yeoman.

Elaine Londak, 64, is the youngest member of WAVES of North
County, a social group of female Navy veterans. She said women
started in that branch of the service in World War I as
"yeomanettes."

Londak was born in 1942, the same year that the WAVES were
formed. She enlisted in the Navy in 1957, served in London during
the Vietnam era, then went to college at a time when there was no
longer a GI Bill to help returning service personnel. She was on
staff in 1973 when the Officers Candidate School training became
co-ed. She retired in 1981 with the rank of lieutenant
commander.

She recalled the many jobs held by WAVES , including one who was
an armed guard and carried a .45. "You'd never know to look at her
that she even knew anything about firearms," Londak said.

Twenty-year veteran Sally Kiely of San Diego was 26 when she
joined the Navy Nurse Corps. She served in Naples, Italy, and in
Japan. And she did a one-year tour in an intensive-care recovery
unit in Vietnam.